Troy Maxson

Troy Maxson (1904-1963) was an African-American Negro League baseball player and trash collector from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1957, he became his city's first black garbage truck driver, having worked as a can lifter for several years beforehand. However, his family became estranged from him due to his infidelity, his alcoholism, and his bitterness, and he died of a heart attack in 1963.

Biography
Troy Maxson was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1904, and he grew up in a working-class African-American family of eleven children. He left home at age 14 after beating up his abusive sharecropper father, and he became a robber to sustain himself. During one robbery, he accidentally killed a man, and he served in prison for a few years. Following his release, he became a talented baseball player, and he played for the professional Negro Leagues; he batted .432 with thirty-seven home runs. However, due to living in an era of widespread racism and segregation, he never made it to the MLB, which had no black players before 1947. In July 1941, he claimed to have wrestled with the Grim Reaper, and he did so while he was sick with pneumonia. By the 1950s, he was married to Rose Lee Maxson and had a son, Cory (as well as another son, Lyons, from a previous marriage), and he worked as a waste collector alongside his best friend Jim Bono. He was left with a bitter view of the world due to the racism which he had experienced as a young person, and because of his poor lot in life. He also had an affair with Alberta, a Florida woman whom he had met at a bar, and she died during childbirth in 1957. That same year, he kicked Cory out of his house after arguing with him over Cory's insistence on playing football over working a real job, and his wife agreed to take care of Alberta's baby daughter, although she said that Maxson no longer had a woman. They lived in the same family home, but they were estranged, and Troy died six years later of a heart attack. Ultimately, Rose admitted to loving Troy despite his flaws, as he loved his family despite being hard-headed and poor at demonstrating affection.